The GSA (General Services Administration), the agency that takes care of the day-to-day office needs of other government agencies, has finally gotten on the warpath about dealing with federal office printing expenses, which total well over a billion dollars per year.

According to an article in the Federal Times, the GSA has targeted initial savings of $300 million over the next few years. This being the government, they are moving slowly: They aren’t getting into the program until 2011.

The biggest part of the strategy is what GSA calls “strategic sourcing.” The idea is simple enough — to consolidate buying within an agency and between agencies in order to use the purchasing muscle of the government to get better deals for machines and consumables, negotiated by professionals.

This all sounds pretty obvious, but even corporations that pride themselves on cost cutting often lack strategic buying plans for printing in place. The GSA plans to negotiate on total cost of ownership rather than the cost of hardware alone, as has been the custom in many government departments.

Meanwhile, the GSA is conducting an audit of current printing assets — with an emphasis on reducing the number of personal printers on user desktops. The aim is to move to fewer, more economical printers, with more modest energy consumption and a common set of consumables, in order to simplify inventory.

Finally, the agency is setting up training to reinforce such issues as duplex printing, printing drafts of color documents in black-and-white and other paper- and consumables-saving tricks.

The GSA has already rationalized other areas of related office expenses, using its strategic sourcing program on purchases of cell phones, office supplies and delivery services, while saving the government hundreds of millions of dollars already.

These are steps that any company should be taking.

Dutch company Printer.com ran a test of several popular fonts to see which used the least amount of ink.

Here are the rankings, starting with the most ink-friendly:

1. Century Gothic
2. Ecofont
3. Times New Roman
4. Calibri
5. Verdana
6. Arial
7. Sans Serif
8. Trebuchet
9. Tahoma
10. Franklin Gothic Medium

The difference can be substantial — Century Gothic, for example, uses 31% less ink than Arial, according to Printer.com.

But there is a catch: Some of the fonts that use less ink, including Century Gothic, are wider than those that don’t, meaning you may use more paper by switching fonts.

Change the default font of your e-mail system.

That’s what Diane Blohowiak, director of computing at the University of Wisconsin Green-Bay, recommends.

To save money when students print e-mails, the school announced it was changing the default font in students’ e-mails from Arial to Century Gothic.

That font uses 30% less toner than Arial, Blohowiak says.

Cost recovery is the strategy of charging customers for such document services as printing, scanning, and copying. According to a recent survey by industry experts Mattern & Associates, the practice is alive and well in the nation’s legal profession.

The company surveyed 49 firms nation-wide. One key conclusion: Charges are migrating from copying and faxing to printing and scanning, a change that has been echoed throughout the digital document business. The biggest change is in scanning services, an area that requires more employee time and expertise to perform.

While over 80% do explicit cost recovery on document services, average prices for services are actually not unreasonable. Color prints, for example, cost 7.9 cents apiece on average, and black-and-white prints come in at 1.8 cents. That’s not bad, given the cost of toner, overhead and employee time -– it’s better than what’s offered at most third-party centers. By comparison, outgoing fax charges are high on average, at $1.12 per page.

One observation: Just as a growing number of companies are cutting back their internal print and copy costs, they’ll be looking more carefully than ever at bills for those services form their law firms.

The report’s conclusion is that law firms need to develop a strategy for pricing scanning, an area far different from the per-click approach used for copying and printing. Setting up a scanning system that allows for quick document searches, no shipping costs and secure storage is starting to replace mountains of file cabinets. For law firms and their clients, working out a mutually agreeable strategy for implementation and costing is a relatively new but critical issue.

Some companies choose to scan all the paper at once, on their own or by hiring a third party to do the scanning.

But there’s another, more gradual method experts recommend for some businesses: the so-called “scan forward” approach.

In that method, the business chooses a cut-off date after which all new documents will be stored electronically. But rather than scanning old files at that time, existing records are only scanned when they’re used. Every time a paper document is accessed, it’s scanned, and the electronic record takes its place.

For example, a health care facility would only scan a patient’s records when that patient visits.

It’s not for everyone — some companies need quick access to all their records. But when possible, it can be a way to ease into the switch to electronic recordkeeping.

The mountain of e-waste is reaching Everest proportions. And businesses trying to recycle face some tough obstacles.

E-waste is the accumulation of obsolete computers, printers, cell phones, and other electronic gear that the fast-moving tech sector is producing at ever growing rate.

The U.S. alone generated over three million tons of the stuff in 2007, according to the EPA (that’s the most recent estimate). Only 13.6% of it was recycled.

A few vendors of copiers, printers and PCs are at last starting to take some responsibility for the recycling of their products . But in too many cases, the electronic gizmos, along with their toxic chemicals (lead, mercury, cadmium and arsenic, just to name a few of the tastier ingredients), end up in land fills.

Even if your company wants to keep from adding to the problem, there are serious obstacles. While a number of start-ups have made a business of hauling off such outmoded equipment, there is a spotty record of dishonest dealing and secret dumping, along with mass exporting of e-waste for unhealthy and dangerous disassembly by child and convict-labor in Third World countries. And there are no government regulations for this booming trade.

One attempt to solve this problem is the e-Stewards Standard (for Responsible Recycling and Reuse of Electronic Equipment).

These standards, monitored by a nonprofit group, hold “participating e-recyclers to a set of high standards including a ban on export, land dumping, incineration, and use of prison labor for toxic components.” The group recommends that corporations and government bodies use only those recyclers who have complied with standard. The site offers a state-by-sate guide to certified recyclers.

Other alternatives: Goodwill Industries will recondition and resell donated e-equipment. Best Buy has a recycling program for electronic junk.

And a number of electronics manufacturers have a take-back program. They are listed here.

In recent years, cell phones (including iPhone and Blackberries) have become as big a business tool as the laptop and the copier, but such devices are even more vulnerable to industrial espionage.

A recent UK survey of companies and institutions revealed that 79% of employees conduct confidential conversations by cell phone, and 51% do so on a daily basis. However, only 18% had security software in place.

Even businesses that carefully encrypt emails and build secure server architectures may be unaware of the issue. Most people are used to making calls from standard, wired telephone, where security is not that big an issue (unless the police or the FBI are wiretapping you). But cell phone signals can be picked up far more easily.

Yes , the phone service companies provide some encryption with their services. But it highly vulnerable. In fact, this summer, German hackers announced they had managed to crack the encryption of mobile calls using GSM, a standard that makes up 80% of the world’s cell phone calls. Furthermore, their code logic will be released to hackers in the near future.

What this means for your business is that such critical details as sales discounts, planned bids and sales leads, subjects often discussed via cell phone, might fall into your rivals or your potential customers.

You may want to take a look at the growing number of hardware and software products that are being developed to give users a higher, harder-to-break level of encryption. These include companies like:

• CallCrypt –http://www.cellcrypt.com/
• Snapcom — http://www.snapshield.com/news.asp?cat=101&id=37
• SecurStar –http://www.securstar.com/products_phonecrypt.php

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act set aside $19 billion in incentives to roll out electronic health record systems. The plan is to improve the health system by making facilities more efficient at administering care so they can pass the savings along to patients.

But a new Harvard study says computerization isn’t helping anything.

The new study (which you can read here) evaluated data on 4,000 U.S. hospitals over a four-year period. It found that the enormous price tag for setting up and operating hospital IT systems outpaces any expected cost savings.

The problem “is mainly that computer systems are built for the accountants and managers and not built to help doctors, nurses and patients,” the report’s lead author, Dr. David Himmelstein, said in an interview with Computerworld.

The push for electronic health records is unlikely to stop, though, and it remains to be seen if the feds’ efforts will be effective.

But the message of the study contains a valuable lesson: Businesses  need to research the advantages to going paperless, and computerization in areas where it will make the biggest impact.

Windows XP compatibility mode.

The tool allows users to run XP within Windows 7 as a virtual PC, allowing full functionality for any application that works on XP.

The solution was suggested by several readers commenting on our previous story “Windows 7: My #@$%* printer won’t work.” Says reader Ian:

“Windows 7 Professional and above allows the opportunity to run Windows XP as a virtual-pc, free of charge so that applications that run only in windows XP and lower can still be used.”

Reader Matt adds: “If anyone’s in a real crunch, they can download a free copy of Windows XP from Microsoft, and run it within Windows 7 in ‘Windows XP compatibility mode’. Compatibility mode allows you to map to all of your USB devices, and hard drives, so the XP OS has access to everything that Windows7 does.”

It might not be the optimal work-around, but it will keep older devices usable until new drivers are available.

Download XP Mode from Microsoft’s Web site here.

Many have a chance to negotiate better prices on equipment leases.

The recession is tough on everyone, and that includes vendors. Therefore, they more be willing to budge on price to keep business going.

You may not even have to switch vendors — many businesses are finding big savings by renegotiating current contracts. Some tips:

1. Do your homework – Come to the discussions armed with market data that shows competitors’ prices have fallen and make your case for a price reduction.
2. Stress the long-term – To offset the vendor’s cost concerns, stress the fact that you’re in it for the long haul and that a reduction is the best way to ensure a long-term relationship. It helps if you’ve been a loyal customer for a while.
3. Pay faster – Vendors are more likely to give you a better deal if you’ve consistently proven you can pay on time, or ahead of time.
4. Think beyond price cuts – If a business won’t budge on costs, try to negotiate better service agreements, discounted supply shipping or other perks.